AUSTIN, Texas — A team of engineers led by 94-year-old John Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, has developed the first all-solid-state battery cells that could lead to safer, faster-charging, longer-lasting rechargeable batteries for handheld mobile devices, electric cars and stationary energy storage.

Goodenough’s latest breakthrough, completed with Cockrell School senior research fellow Maria Helena Braga, is a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a long cycle life (battery life) with a high volumetric energy density and fast rates of charge and discharge. The engineers describe their new technology in a recent paper published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

...other leading battery researchers are skeptical, even mystified, by Goodenough’s claim. For his invention to work as described, they say, it would probably have to abandon the laws of thermodynamics, which say perpetual motion is not possible.

Not being a chemist can someone point me to a discussion on the issues. Why do some people think it shouldn't be possible?

CWatters: To follow up on your original post: the basic argument by the critics is that if you're taking lithium (or sodium) on one side, and transferring it to the other side, then you're not doing any work; you've just moved it. You could just scrape it off the cathode, put it back on the anode, and voila, recharged!

The possible hole I immediately saw with that argument is that you have to be able to state that being plated on the cathode is not a lower energy state - that you actually can just "remove" it without doing work, that its presence plated on the surface isn't held fast by intermolecular forces.

"In this case, scientists wonder how it is possible to strip lithium from the anode and plate it on a cathode current collector to obtain a battery voltage since the voltage is the difference in the chemical potentials (Fermi energies) between the two metallic electrodes," Goodenough stated. "The answer is that if the lithium plated on the cathode current collector is thin enough for its reaction with the current collector to have its Fermi energy lowered to that of the current collector, the Fermi energy of the lithium anode is higher than that of the thin lithium plated on the cathode current collector."

As a general rule, I'm inclined to believe the peer reviewed process at Energy and Environmental Science

A traditional problem with solid electrolyte batteries has been low power density relative to liquid electrolyte batteries. That is, if many times more battery versus an existing liquid li-ion is required to supply the required power (discharge rate), the increased energy density by itself won't make a good transportation battery.

Indeed, a skeptic of the paper (Steingart) finds current density of the new battery as described should be 10 to 1000 times lower than the traditional Li-ion battery.

Hello everybody. There is a very detailed in-depth analysis of the Braga/Goodenough batteries, written by Matt Lacey, a Swedish scientist specialized in the Li battery research. I am not competent enough to evaluate to which extent it is correct, but there are some very interesting details and questions raised: